By Melanie Trottier-Mitcheson | Observer Contributor
Social media, emails, texts, news, AI, games: access to technology can be a daily source of distraction. Mount students reveal their strategies to stay focused.
The typical college student’s routine day is punctuated by a series of buzzes, pings, and alarms from a device. This barrage of digital noise, studies show, takes a toll on human attention spans. University of Texas at Austin professor and writer Steven Mintz quotes a Microsoft study finding that the average human attention span decreased from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013. Humans now pay attention for a shorter time than a goldfish.
Student Ian Dolan puts his phone on Do Not Disturb during class. “I like to think I won’t get distracted, but if I hear the buzz, I might,” he admits. The average digital user receives 80 or more notifications per day and consults their screens between 80 and 160 times. “The worst thing is that the brain gets used to notifications” and normalizes them, according to Sara Williams, Director of Advising & Student SUCCESS. “We get used to living on high alert.” Although she acknowledges it is challenging for students (especially those who are parents) Williams stresses the importance of managing notifications “so they’re not disrupting you from being present and in class.”
In order to prioritize, marketing student Jessica Lee relies on lists which she composes in her Notes app, to stay on task. “I never put the biggest task first or at the end,” she shares. Lee starts with an easier task as a warm-up before diving into the harder work. Robert Mayer, Head of Veterans Services, is also a fan of the written to-do list (“I’m old-school”) aided by technology: when he wakes up at night is away from the office but afraid of forgetting something important, he sends himself an email, then gives himself permission to go back to sleep or leisure pursuits.
Technical Services & Circulation Assistant Linda Patient and Collections & Instructions Librarian Matthew Raymond shared their observations on focus, based on their own digital use and observing students. It’s not all positive. Patient notes how easy it is to get “dragged into some question on Quora” where misinformation abounds. Raymond feels that social media, unlike other media (film, books) which can be shared and debated, is “all about you,” leading to a narcissistic outlook or unhealthy comparisons to others. Kiara “Kiki” Logan, Administrative Assistant I in the Learning Success Center, sums it up with the 2024 Oxford Word of the Year referring to the unhealthy online mix of toxicity, clickbait, and time wasting: “brain rot.”
Raymond encourages students to “put the phone away; watch a foreign movie.” While he doesn’t force books on library patrons, he challenges them to “experience something that’s unique to you, unrelated to an algorithm.” Logan urges students toward real-life interactions with another person or with nature: “Go plant something and see if you can make it grow.”
To summarize, for better quality of life and output as an MWCC student, switch up your activities and switch off your notifications (except from your advisor).
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